CTA Public

The planned baseline for CTA includes 40 Medium-Size Telescopes (MSTs) – 25 in the southern hemisphere and 15 in the northern hemisphere. The MST will be built by an international collaboration of institutes and universities from Germany, France, Brazil, Poland, Switzerland and the United States. The MSTs will be sensitive to gamma rays in the core energy range of CTA, from about 100 GeV to 10 TeV. The telescopes have a modified Davies-Cotton design with a reflector of 12 m in diameter on a polar mount and a focal length of 16 m. Based on the performance for shower detection and reconstruction in this energy range for existing instruments, the MSTs will use 10-15 m diameter optical reflectors made up of approximately 1.2 m mirrors and be spaced apart in the 100 m range.

Image: Illustrative schematic with main components of the MST.

Preparatory Phase work packages specifically related to the medium-sized telescopes are:

Medium-sized Telescope System Engineering and Integration

Design & Prototyping of the Medium Telescope Structure & Optics